ATS 113
1/25/2017
Chapter 1: • Explain why television newscasts have weather segments but not climate segments. • Weather changes on a day to day or even an hourly basis. People want to know whether it will be raining, very hot, or sunny and clear skies on a particular day so that they are prepared. Climate however changes very slowly, if it does at all. A climate broadcast would be unnecessary because they would be repeating the same thing for many days and even years. • Why is it difficult to define an absolute top of the atmosphere? • We have no way of establishing the atmosphere’s upper boundary because no definition exists of how much air in a given volume constitutes the presence of an atmosphere. Since the density of the atmospheric gases decrease with height, the atmosphere slowly merges to space, which makes it difficult to find the “absolute” top. • What are the homosphere and the heterosphere? • Layers of the atmosphere based on …show more content…
The Earth travels around the Sun in a year long path in what is called an orbit. • Explain why the equator always has 12 hours of sunlight. • The equator always has 12 hours of sunlight because the equator is equally divided between the light and darkened halves of the Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, the length of the day is longer when the North Pole is tilted toward the Sun and shorter during the months when tilted away from the Sun. The reverse is accurate for the Southern Hemisphere as well. Since the equator is exactly halfway between these two poles, it would not make sense for the equator’s day to be shorter or longer when one of the poles is experiencing that. • If you were to travel from the equator to the North Pole, on what day would variations in solar radiation be smallest? Why? Explain how daylength and solar angle change as you move